Confessions of a Reluctant Startalian

It’s good to feel inspired, when you’re trying to write a book-type thing, or even a witty article or blog post, to achieve lofty goals. You want to think big. Like, what if you invented your own language? And made everyone speak it, and be goddamn grateful for the privilege? From truck drivers to hedge fund managers to teachers, road workers. and aspiring thespians?

Too lofty, you say? Not so. It’s been accomplished by Starbucks.

If you want Starbucks product, you need to speak its pidgin form of Italian. None of the planet’s 24,000 Starbucks are in Italy — though I guess one’s finally in the offing for next year — but that doesn’t signify. You can say you want a Grande, a Venti®, or because America’s a supersizer, now a Trenta®. Also a Frappuccino® — about as Italian as a Big Mac, but the –uccino thing is clearly Italian flair. Or even a Fizzio™. (That one, name-wise, may be a bit of a misfire. It fizzles.)

Lo these many years ago, when I first crossed a Starbucks threshold — I’m in my mid-40s, so I can boast about a quarter-century of sporadic Starbucks patronage — I had the innocence, the arrogance to resist. Not the drinks themselves (because I’ve always found the Americanos pretty tasty, I won’t lie) but the pidgin Italian. No, I said churlishly to my private self, standing in line, waiting to order. No. I will not do this thing. I’d been to Europe, and I liked it, but my thinking went: this isn’t Europe. This is an American caffeinated beverage chain. So when I got to the register I’d say something like: “I’d like a medium coffee, please.”

I’d get a raised eyebrow and a rephrase for clarity, and I would nod stiffly. You may speak your franchise Startalian, I thought grumpily, but you will not visit it on me.

Later, in the tempered wisdom of maturity, I’d come to recognize Startalian as a simple variation of McDonalds- or Burger King-speak, an upwardly mobile version of basic food-chain branding. I mean, would I stand at the register in Mickey D’s and order “one of those burgers with two patties?” No, I’d say a Big Mac. In refusing to say “Grande” I was suffering from petty reverse snobbery.

But the truth is that when you’re ordering a Grande, and the lights are low, and the décor’s making a gesture at good taste, with furniture in dark veneer and sometimes sage-green or rust-red upholstery with discreet swirly patterns on it, and the chairs are comfortable, you do feel a certain elevation. You may have just pulled a long-haul all-nighter from Sheboygan, but here you are, speaking Startalian and, through your casual mastery of the lingo, acquiring a fine-tasting drug, in a vaguely opium-den setting, that’s also perfectly legal. There may have been a few naysayers back in the ’90s, a few who dismissed the Starbucks juggernaut by lumping together liberals, lattes, and Volvos, but those days are past. Nowadays, citizens of any stripe will belly up to the barista and feel a little classy.

Still, there’s a big difference between a Venti® and a Whopper®. And I don’t mean the ingredients. In taking fast-food language and décor in the direction of, say, high-fashion clothing emporia along Fifth Avenue or Rodeo Drive, Starbucks makes an overt appeal to our vision of ourselves as refined consumers with a taste for the finer things. And the finer things are European. Or pseudo-European. You may not feel you have the bank balance to shop for couture by some Italian designer with a shingle in Beverly Hills, but damn if you can’t treat yourself to a Grande — every day, even, for 16 years. It’s a wallet death by a thousand cuts. And it feels pretty good.

When you step into Starbucks, you step into the boudoir of the upper middle class — or if you’re not there yet, your upper-middle-class future. Doesn’t matter that the beans and dairy arrive in mammoth trucks along the asphalt arteries of the nation: you have a brief illusion of sipping your poison in a surrounding of luxe, or as close as a global-chain coffee purveyor can come. Which makes Starbucks an ideal place to sit with your laptop, if you’re the aspirational type. Starbucks is littered with laptop-typists. Sure, locally owned cafes with non-branded beverages are hipper, but when they’re not available — er, possibly driven out of business — Starbucks can serve.

Because there’s no inspiration sitting in a Mickey D’s. You’re not going to linger at a table there, beneath the flatness of bright light, surrounded by polymers in primary colors, listening to families squabble at the register over the kids’ sodas or whether they’re allowed to get large fries, and feel you may possibly be typing out a work of ascendant genius. Ditto for Burger King, Carl’s Jr., Wendy’s, etc. Starbucks has some food, that’s true, but the smell of fryer oil is not pervasive, and if there are kids around they’re likely teenagers, snapping pics of their misspelled names on whipped-cream drinks to post on Instagram. They’re too cool to argue and they don’t make much noise.

All of this means that Starbucks adds up to more than location + coffee; Starbucks is a success model, far more so than the Golden Arches or its meat-marketing mates. Despite its food offerings, the place with the weird mermaid logo remains first and foremost a seller not of nourishment but of predictable, controllable rush. A rush that produces, a restaurant chain that produces — not only coffee, but you. The green-and-white mermaid is a mythic figure, a styling of pure fantasy: and that’s the genius of Starbucks and its Startalian. Here you can become one with the furnishings and the product; here you also can embody a successful fantasy, a sheaf of straw turned into gold. You too can be — if only while you linger — a boutique idea, translated to a mass market.

Lydia Millet
is the author of 13 novels, including three for young readers, and a book of short stories called Love in Infant Monkeys, which was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent novel, Sweet Lamb of Heaven, a psychological thriller about a woman who hears voices, was published May 3 by W.W. Norton.

Who is the greatest American writer? In any such conversation, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner must be considered. And when discussing anything both great and American, Donald Trump -- who has written more books than either aforementioned novelist and is perhaps the greatest American of all -- obviously merits mention. But of the three, who is the greatest writer? The following comparison should move the discussion along:
Number of Books Written:
Hemingway: 15
Faulkner: 13
Trump: 18
Literary Influence:
Hemingway: Gertrude Stein
Faulkner: James Joyce
Trump: Scriptwriters for The A-Team, Airwolf
Often Compared To:
Hemingway: Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)
Faulkner: Henry James (Daisy Miller)
Trump: Benito Mussolini (The Doctrine of Fascism)
Profound Quote:
Hemingway: “The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” -- A Farewell to Arms
Faulkner: “Memory believes before knowing remembers.” — Light in August
Trump: “If you have laws that you don't enforce, then you don't have laws. This leads to lawlessness.” — Crippled AmericaOn Love:
Hemingway: “You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.” (A Moveable Feast)
Faulkner: “They say love dies between two people. That’s wrong. It doesn’t die. It just leaves you, goes away, if you aren’t good enough, worthy enough.” (“The Wild Palms”)
Trump: “There’s nothing more terrible than an ex-spouse with a ten-ton axe to grind, and no agreement on how your common property is to be divided.” (Think BIG and Kick Ass in Business and Life)
Attitude Towards Women:
Hemingway: Troubling
Faulkner: Problematic
Trump: Medieval
Intractable Problem:
Hemingway: Depression
Faulkner: Alcoholism
Trump: Twitter
Memorable Film:
Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls, starring Gary Cooper
Faulkner: Tomorrow, starring Robert Duvall
Trump: Cameo in Home Alone 2, starring Macaulay Culkin
Unifying Theme:
Hemingway: Life is a constant test of man’s will and fortitude.
Faulkner: We must confront the darkness that lurks within ourselves.
Trump: Donald Trump is like Scrooge McDuck, but with pants. Also, he hates himself.
Titles that Reference Thinking “BIG” While Assaulting Acquaintances and Business Associates:
Hemingway: 0
Faulkner: 0
Trump: 1 (Think BIG and Kick Ass in Business and Life)
Muse:
Hemingway: Martha Gellhorn, fellow war correspondent
Faulkner: Meta Carpenter, Howard Hawks’s secretary
Trump: Donald Trump, clothed orangutan
Politically Notable For:
Hemingway: Siding with the Republicans while covering the Spanish Civil War
Faulkner: Keeping his affiliations to himself at a time of great social upheaval
Trump: Running for president to extend his brand, then at some point realizing, Oh fuck, it’s for real
Image Credit: LPW.

12 comments:

Am I the last of the hold-outs when it comes to refusing to bend to their ridiculous naming scheme then? I still hold my head high, ordering “medium” or “large” rather than partake in Startalian. And lo, my wife now actually works for a Starbucks! Still, I remain steadfast as I gladly indulge. I, too, like their Americanos.

“Starbucks makes an overt appeal to our vision of ourselves as refined consumers with a taste for the finer things. And the finer things are European. Or pseudo-European.”

Ironic, then, is the tendency of the Starbucks servers in Berlin to behave like perky Ambassadors of the AWOL (American Way of Life) here on the continent, with all the imaginary (long-faded) luxury that projects.

I submit happily to star bucks lingo and giving my name (I just say “Ann” as it is much easier if my barista is new comer to Canada). Yelling “Bill” is sure a lot easier on the low paid staff then yelling “tall nonfat extra hot no foam no whip mocha”. And damn they do make a fine Americano.

It gets even more ridiculous here in Spain where “grande” is the actual word we use to means large. So every time I’m at a Starbucks I end up hearing someone ordering a grande and the barista replying “but grande grande or grande medium?”

….in Lucerne it’s interesting: while Starbucks signifies Trenta bad taste, a local [gastronomically far superior] impostor by the name of Bachmann has…evolved and ranks only as a Grande on the caliculus-gustatererius-abomination scale….

“there’s no inspiration sitting in a Mickey D’s. You’re not going to linger at a table there, beneath the flatness of bright light, surrounded by polymers in primary colors, listening to families squabble at the register over the kids’ sodas or whether they’re allowed to get large fries, and feel you may possibly be typing out a work of ascendant genius.”

Have to disagree with that. If you want realism, and a look into the heart and soul of America – it’s dreams, nightmares and baffling contradictions – spend a lunch hour in a downtown Micky D’s. McDonalds is a Herzog documentary; Starbucks is a Big 3 Network sit-com with a laugh-track.

All this takes me back to the early days of A&W, when they introduced their line of family-based burgers: Papa Burger and the rest. We had a friend, Max, who liked the burgers but would not succumb to the A&W nomenclature. He’d ask for a large burger, be asked, “You mean a Papa Burger?” and growl, “No. I mean a large-sized hamburger, goddammit!” Usually the servers got the message and delivered the sandwich without any genealogy attached. I’d usually avoid the issue by saying, “I’ll have what he’s having.”

Derryk, I beseech you, go into a star bucks, wait inline with the hipsters order a grande (or super big) Americano black. Then tell me it’s a milkshake. But be advised, when you tell me it is the best coffee you ever had, you will be very hyper. YUM.

If you are a writer with a Facebook or Twitter account, you surely know that we are already two days into National Novel Writing Month -- or as it’s known in the Twitterverse #NaNoWriMo -- the month in which writers across the globe commit to writing a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. Last year, 325,142 lunatics writers took part. They’ve done pretty well, too. According to the NaNoWriMo website, since the program started in 1999, it has spawned more than 250 published novels, including bestsellers like Sara Gruen’sWater for Elephants and Erin Morgenstern’sThe Night Circus.
Here at The Millions, we’re a little slower on the draw. Our longtime contributing editor Garth Risk Hallberg took seven years to write his debut novel City on Fire, which came out in October. That’s fairly quick compared to our staff writer Bill Morris, who confessed in a piece last week that it took him 16 years to publish his first novel, Motor City. Even the relative speed demons on our staff, like Emily St. John Mandel and Claire Cameron, have gone more than a year without publishing a book.
With this slacker history in mind, we would like to propose a kinder, gentler alternative to NaNoWriMo, to be called National Paragraph Writing Month, during which we all strive to write one truly worthwhile paragraph. (Garth will probably have to write two paragraphs because his books are 900 pages long, but the rest of us are sticking with just the one, thanks.)
We are launching #NaGrafWriMo in recognition of all the writers with jobs and family obligations, and those who just spend an ungodly amount of time on the Internet, who find it hard to read a whole book in a month, much less write one. But we are also embarking on this new program because we have found that, for most writers, it can take more talent, determination, and hard work to write one good paragraph than an entire lousy book.
Unlike NaNoWriMo, we won’t be able to offer online webinars or pep talks from bestselling authors like Diana Gabaldon or Charlaine Harris. We talked about maybe doing #NaGrafWriMo coffee mugs and T-shirts, but sadly, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen, either. We do have achievement badges, though! Here are a few we will be awarding:
The Adverb Avenger: This badge will be awarded to any #NaGrafWriMo writer who cuts two or more unnecessary adverbs from his or her paragraph.
The Gustave Flaubert: This badge will be awarded to any #NaGrafWriMo writer who spends a morning writing a sentence and an afternoon revising it.
The Do-Over: This badge will be awarded to any #NaGrafWriMo writer who recognizes that every word he or she has written so far is total shit and has to be written over again from scratch.
I was tipped off in advance about the launch of #NaGrafWriMo, and started my paragraph at the stroke of midnight on November 1. Here’s what I’ve got so far:
I could barely see the sun as it lazily yawned at yet another gray wet dawn. I longed for the warm blanket of cigarette smoke. The phone rang.
I know, I know, it’s pretty rough. It’s underdeveloped and a little derivative, and already I can see an adverb I need to cut. But it’s only November 2, right? I’ve got 29 more days to work out the kinks.
Start working on those paragraphs, Millions readers. Go, #NaGrafWriMo!
Image Credit: Pixabay.